The pursuit of high lift-to-drag ratio (L/D) hypersonic bodies has been underway for decades. Vehicle performance can be greatly increased by taking advantage of the hyperbolic nature of an invisicid flowfield. One such example of this approach is the waverider family of vehicles. Waveriders effectively increase the lift generated by a vehicle moving through the air at high speed by riding the shock wave that the vehicle itself has created.
Existing hypersonic vehicles have two dimensional arrayed RAM/SCRAMjet engines which integrate poorly with high performance waverider vehicles, have marginal performance, and are historically heavy. Typical hypersonic vehicles attempted to overcome the poor integration and heavy engine weight by scaling up the vehicle to unrealistic sizes. The inherent performance and design issues of these vary large vehicles have never been solved.
It is therefore desirable to provide a low-weight, high-performance hypersonic vehicle.